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My older sister stopped FaceTiming our mom three months after she started Ozempic. Last weekend I found out why. I'd flown to Charlotte to stay with her for four days. Friday and Saturday were normal. She made coffee. We watched a movie. Her husband grilled. I went to bed at midnight in her guest room thinking my sister was fine. I got up at 2 in the morning to get water. The light was on under the bathroom door at the end of the guest hallway. I heard the shower running. I almost went back to bed. People take showers. People can't sleep. But I stood there. Something in the way the light cut under the door felt wrong. I knocked. Soft. Once. She didn't answer. I knocked again. Nothing. I opened the door. She was on the floor. Sitting against the side of the tub, in her robe, with her knees pulled up. A white hand towel pressed to the top of her head with both her hands. The shower was running into an empty tub behind her. No steam on the mirror. Cold water. She had turned it on so I wouldn't hear her in here. She looked up at me. Her eyes were dry. That was what broke me. I had been ready for tears. I was not ready for the face of someone who had been done crying for a long time. I felt my throat close. I said her name. She said one thing. Quiet. Almost a whisper. “Please don't tell Mom." I knelt down on the bath mat. I reached past her shoulder and turned the water off. The bathroom went silent. I could hear her breathing. I could hear my own. I said: how long. She said: "Since April." It was January. I sat with that. Nine months. Nine months of my sister getting up in the dark and walking down her own hallway and locking herself in this bathroom and turning a cold shower on so her husband wouldn't hear her. I had been here twice in those nine months. I had slept down the hall both times. I asked her what was under the towel. She closed her eyes. She lifted it off. I have to tell you what I saw and I am going to try to do it without crying on my keyboard. It wasn't bald. I want to say that first. My sister was not bald… IT WAS WORSE THAN BALD! There was a part down the middle of her head three fingers wide. Pink. Smooth. The skin you are not supposed to see on someone's head. The hair on either side of it was thinner than I had ever seen hair on a living person. You could see the shape of her skull through it under the bathroom light. Her hair, my whole life, had been the thickest in our family. Mom used to make her sit on a stool when she braided it because it was too heavy to do standing up. I looked at the part in her hair and I could not find the sister I grew up with in it. I had seen her at Easter. At Mom's 70th in June. At the lake in August. She had worn her hair down at all three. I had not noticed. She put the towel back on her head and she said the second thing she said to me on that bathroom floor. "I'm so tired." And then she let me hold her. She told me the rest sitting on the bath mat. The shedding started at month four. Pillow. Drain. Hairbrush coming back looking like a small animal. By month six she could fit her ponytail through her engagement ring. She went to her doctor. Full blood panel. Iron, thyroid, B12, the works. Everything came back normal. Then her doctor gave her the speech. "It's stress. Or hormones. Or that surgery you had last year. Or a medication change from 90 days ago. Could be your nutrition. Could be your genetics. It's the rapid weight loss. Give it three to six months. Eat more protein. Try biotin." So my sister did the things. Biotin. Nutrafol. Collagen powder that tasted like wet drywall. A rosemary oil that turned her pillowcase orange. Some scalp serum off TikTok for $112. Month seven. Month nine. Month eleven. The shedding slowed. The hair did not come back. She stopped FaceTiming Mom because she didn't want Mom to see her part. She stopped going to family dinners because the lighting at restaurants made her crown visible from above. She stopped seeing me, she said this with her eyes on the tile, because she knew I'd notice first. We sat on that floor until almost 4. I made her tea I never drank. I didn't say much. There wasn't much to say. I flew home Monday morning. I am not on Ozempic. I have never been on Ozempic. I sat at my own kitchen table for the next three days and I read everything I could find about hair loss in women on the shot. I read forums. I read studies. I read four-page Reddit threads written by women who could have been my sister. I read a woman in Ohio say she'd been crying in her car at red lights for a year. I read another say her husband still hadn't figured out why she'd been wearing a shower cap to bed. I learned things my sister's doctor had not told her. Her doctor had told her about one thing happening to her hair. A real thing, the shedding from rapid weight loss. The kind that gets better on its own. Her doctor had not told her about the second thing. When you lose a lot of fat fast on Ozempic, you are not just losing weight. You are losing the estrogen your fat was making. This was the thing I read three different specialists say in three different places before I believed it. Fat isn't just storage. Fat makes estrogen. A lot of it. And women in their forties are leaning on that fat-made estrogen because their ovaries are starting to slow down. My sister, in fifteen months, had lost 71 pounds. Most of her estrogen had walked out the door with it. And here's what nobody had told her about her estrogen. There is a hormone in every woman's body called DHT. It's been in your blood since you were a teenager. The reason it never bothered your hair is that estrogen was sitting around your hair follicles like a bodyguard, keeping DHT away from them. When the estrogen drops, the bodyguard walks off the job. DHT walks in. The follicle starts producing thinner, finer hair. Until eventually it stops producing visible hair at all. That is the part that does not fix itself when your weight stabilizes. Not on biotin. Not on protein. Not on time. It only stops when something stops the DHT. And nothing my sister's doctor had given her stops the DHT. I read trichologists saying this same thing. I read the American Hair Loss Association saying it. I read women in private GLP-1 forums begging other women to figure it out before month twelve, because by then they had spent thousands of dollars on biotin and Nutrafol and serums and lasers and were watching their part get wider every week. Then I found two ingredients that stop DHT in two different ways. Pumpkin seed oil tells your body to stop making new DHT. Saw palmetto pulls the DHT that's already there off your follicles. You need both. One without the other does about half the job. I almost laughed when I read it. My grandfather took both of those for his prostate. Different problem, same hormone. Then I read about formulations. Most of what's on Amazon is junk, raw seed powder instead of concentrated extract, male prostate formulas in pink bottles. The one I kept seeing trichologists recommend, and women in those forums credit, was a formulation called Bloom & Bond. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto, dosed for women, no biotin filler. I ordered a bottle to my sister's house Wednesday afternoon. I called her. I told her what I'd found. I told her not on biotin, not on time, on this. She cried on the phone. She'd already been crying for a year. I flew back to Charlotte six weeks later. She picked me up at the airport with her hair down. I didn't say anything in the car. I didn't want to make it a thing in case I was wrong. We got back to her house and she walked me into the same bathroom. She turned the lights on. She handed me a comb. She said: "Look." There were baby hairs coming in along the part. Short. Soft. The length of a pinkie nail. She put her head on my shoulder for the first time since we were teenagers. The next morning she FaceTimed Mom from the kitchen while the coffee brewed. Mom cried. I cried. My sister did not cry. She had already done that part. I am writing this from my own apartment, four states away from my sister. I am not on Ozempic. But I have a sister, and a mother who took the shot last March, and three friends from college who started this year. I am writing this because if you are on Ozempic, or your sister is, or your mother is, or your best friend is, I do not want you to find any of them on a bathroom floor at 2am with a wet towel on their head and a cold shower running so their husband can't hear them. There are two things happening in the body of every woman on Ozempic right now. Not one. Their doctor is going to tell them about the first one. Their doctor is probably not going to tell them about the second one. Picture her nine months from now. She has hit her goal weight. Her A1C is down. Her jeans fit. She has won the thing she started this for. And she is sitting on her own bathroom floor at 2am with a wet towel pressed to her head because she can't look in the vanity mirror anymore. She is parting her hair on the opposite side. She is declining the camera-on meeting. She is not going to her niece's wedding because she doesn't want to be in the photos. She is not telling her husband, because the day she says it out loud is the day he asks the one question she does not have an answer to. Why are you still on it? You do not want to find her there. Which is exactly why you do not wait. If she has not started Ozempic yet, get her on Bloom & Bond the same week she fills her first prescription. Not month four. The same week. If she is already shedding, order it tonight. The door is still open. It does not stay open. If she is past the shedding and her hair has not come back, that is the second thing nobody told her about. Nothing else is going to fix it because nothing else is going at the hormone that is causing it. 👉 https://bloomandbonds.com/products/new-pumpkin-seed-oil-softgels To my sister: You sat on a bathroom floor for fifteen months and I slept down the hall. I'm sorry I didn't notice at Easter. I'll FaceTime Mom on Sunday. I'll see you at Christmas.